Generating Split files for story formats (Instagram, Facebook)

The rise of "story-based formats" on social media platforms have put other types of demands on your video content – mostly the ability to split longer narratives into separate pieces to leverage built-in functionality on these platforms.

Since there are no publishing APIs available – meaning that you can't publish stories directly from Story Engine – you can generate your Video Studio storyboards as split files: Giving you one video file per slide on the storyboard when you generate it. This means that you can work with your storyboard as usual and when generating you get already split files that you then can upload to Instagram Stories or Facebook Stories for instance.

This is how it works

The "Generate" button in Video Studio is a dropdown that lets you choose between Preview, Full and Split. There is no preview function for Split files because you're better off viewing your preview as a coherent video file before choosing to generate a Split. (Notice: When choosing Split you will also get a Full version, so you do not have to do a separate version if you, for instance, want to post the Full version as a regular video post through the built-in distribution and then want to enhance a version through Instagram stories.)

So, for repetition:

• Preview gives you a preview render of the complete storyboard, in lower resolution and framerate. This should be used to proof your movie.
• Full gives you the regular high-resolution render of the complete storyboard.
• Split gives you a high-resolution render of each and every slide on the storyboard as a separate video file and also a complete version like with Full.

When you have generated a Split, you will find your generated files in the Asset Browser (this is pending a future change) under "Generated." The Split files are numbered with an "XX" number before the actual file name for easy identification.

Download the files to your computer

You have to download the files to your computer – and in the case of Instagram also transfer them to your phone to be able to use them in the story formats.

1. Open the Asset Browser from the top menu by clicking "Assets."
2. Open the "Generated" files tab by clicking "Generated."
3. Locate your first Split file; this should have the number "01" in the beginning.
4. Double-click the thumbnail of that file to go into "Asset Details" view.
5. Download the file either by using the "Download" option from the "..."- menu on the video player itself or by ctrl-clicking the link next to "File." (See image below.)
6. Proceed to the next file by using the filmstrip in the "Asset Details" window. Download all files to your computer.

Transfer the files to your phone for use on Instagram

For Instagram Stories you will need to then transfer these files to your phone since Instagram only allows upload of video through the mobile application. This is out of scope for Story Engine, but there are a few different ways you could approach this if you need to.

Cloud Storage solutions

Regardless of your computer platform (Windows or MacOS) or smartphone platform (Android or iOS, mainly), you could always use a few proven methods for file transfer between computer and phone. These include, but are not limited to, Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive from Microsoft (all of which are platform independent) and iCloud Drive (built-in to MacOS + iOS combinations).

These types of could services allow you to sync content from your computer with the cloud storage and download the files to your connected smartphone.

Direct Transfer – wireless or connected

There are specific methods that will allow you to directly transfer the files from your computer to your phone without the need for cloud syncing. If you are on MacOS and have an iPhone, you could use a wireless solution called Airdrop that allows you to move images and videos directly from the computer to the Image library on the phone. If you can get this to work, it's probably the easiest solution.

If you're using an Android phone, there are apps and services like Airdroid (paid solution), that allows you to access your phone from a browser on your computer and to transfer files over your local wireless network – both to and from the phone.

Email

An old-school but almost bulletproof solution is the old "email it to yourself" trick. So attach the files to an email that you send to yourself and then open that email on your phone and download them from the email client on the phone. This is more or less the same as having a cloud sync solution going.

These are all suggestions for methods and services that Story Engine can't control but are to the extent that we can see are serious and well-functioning.